textile design & innovations

Mechanical Textiles

This term might be a little strange but it includes part of transformable textiles that depends on mechanical movement to change the shape of the textile or garments in order to change shape and look in the application of fashion or to change function, which is very limits and is applied in more of a fun way as we will demonstrate in the persona space dress below.

The movement can be adapted from different system, mechanical, shape memory (smart) or pneumatic systems in order to get the movement required.

Hussein Chalayan dress adapted from [1].

The other dressed from his show in 2007 [3] are summarised in these gifs images.

Some other designers created systems to do more of a funny function such as the personal space dress, which inflate the dress in a way similar to the umbrella mechanism when the motion detector sense a near by movement to bush the person a little far. This dress is designed by Kathleen Marie [5].

Kathleen Marie has another transformable mechanical system, the auto filter, which is a scarf equipped with a pollution sensor. The scarf will cover the wearer face when pollution is detected as demonstrated in the gif image below.

Laura Malinverni and Core Belloto designed the Gusho dress, which inflate and react to electromagnetic radiation ( as the one from cell phone) to protect the body [4], below.

An example of a mechanical dress construction by Guy Stevens adapted from [2].